Good, hard working, Politics.
AARP Decision Followed a Long GOP Courtship
By David S. Broder and Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 20, 2003; Page A01
AARP's decision this week to endorse Medicare prescription drug legislation, a step that caught Democrats by surprise, was the product of years of cultivation by the Bush administration and top Republicans on Capitol Hill.
The dialogue that led to AARP's seal of approval for the $400 billion measure, providing the first prescription drug benefit to seniors while opening the Medicare system to private insurance competition, included intense discussions in recent weeks with House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (Ill.) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.) and a private conversation between President Bush and AARP President James Parkel.
The AARP endorsement "didn't happen overnight," said Thomas A. Scully, administrator of the agency that runs Medicare. "We spent a lot of time working with them over the last three years."
The action by AARP, which represents 35 million members age 50 and older, has substantially increased chances of the bill's final passage in the next week. But it has produced a backlash from members and fierce criticism from Democrats, who have been the group's traditional allies. The repercussions could be felt in next year's campaign, when the support of older voters will be a goal of both parties.
Yesterday, the two top Democrats in Congress, Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), sent a letter to AARP chief executive William Novelli expressing "our profound concern" and demanding an explanation for the decision.
The Democrats predicted that Novelli would regret supporting the bill. They cited a poll taken this week for the AFL-CIO by Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, which found that only 18 percent of AARP members agreed with the organization's endorsement. The AFL-CIO opposes the bill.
Yesterday afternoon, about two dozen disgruntled AARP members from Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania gathered in the rain outside the organization's downtown Washington headquarters to cut up their membership cards. The protest was organized by two liberal advocacy groups.
Perhaps more significant, the AARP Web site's computer bulletin board was filled with angry messages from members. Novelli acknowledged in a CNBC interview that most of the e-mails he had received were critical -- though other officials played down the dissent as unrepresentative of AARP members.
Lurking in the background were memories of the Reagan-era "catastrophic insurance" law, a measure AARP endorsed, which was quickly repealed when it became clear that many seniors opposed its new charges.
Democrats say that there are equally serious flaws in this proposal that will become evident to seniors as they learn more about it.
But for now, Republicans, while being careful not to gloat, reveled in the spectacle of the Democratic leaders -- and many of the Democratic presidential candidates -- quarreling with the nation's largest group representing older Americans.
A White House spokesman said Bush had his tête-à-tête with Parkel on Oct. 29 and told him, "We can get this done if you will work with us."
Long before that, Frist and Hastert, who both have years of experience with health care legislation, had begun discussions with Novelli and AARP's policy director, John Rother.
The dialogue opened well before the bill began to take shape, as Hastert picked up on an opening created by his predecessor, Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), and Frist, a physician, moved to repair what he saw as a lack of outreach to health care groups by his predecessor, Trent Lott (R-Miss.). Hastert "has been talking to them on and off for two years," spokesman John Feehry said. "He'd go to dinner with Novelli on occasion, have phone calls. It was important to keep them in the loop."
Rother said that "as the negotiations intensified" among House Republicans and a bipartisan group of senators over separate Medicare bills the chambers had passed, "our meetings intensified." Last Friday and Saturday, during the final hours, AARP officials had repeated phone calls and e-mail exchanges in which conferees tested whether their ideas would be acceptable to the group.
In general, AARP officials said, the bill is not perfect -- but it provides the best chance in years to begin offering badly needed help to seniors in buying prescription drugs. At the end, the group pressed successfully for larger financial incentives to deter employers from dropping benefits for their retirees, additional assistance for low-income Medicare patients, and a promise that a controversial new system of price competition from private health plans in the program would be experimental, not permanent
Historically, AARP has usually allied itself with the Democratic Party, which was instrumental in creating Social Security and Medicare, the twin pillars of economic security for the elderly. Conservatives financed alternative seniors organizations, hoping to contest AARP's influence, but without notable success.
In 1995, then-Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), a critic of AARP, held a hearing to publicize the group's finances, which included $173 million in commissions on health, life and other insurance, mutual funds and prescription drugs, plus $86 million in government grants. Simpson said, "I'm not here to destroy the AARP, but I am here to get rid of hypocrisy and duplicity."
But Gingrich said yesterday that a closer relationship began when Republicans took over the House and Senate in 1995 and continued with AARP's hiring of Novelli in 1999.
Novelli had worked as a public relations adviser with both corporate and nonprofit clients, but in the decade before coming to AARP he had managed CARE, the private international relief agency, and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
Gingrich describes him as someone "who realizes that Medicare must be reformed at the same time it is protected and expanded. And he has said all along that the bill must be bipartisan to pass."
Democrats suggested yesterday that Gingrich had swayed Novelli's judgment, pointing to a passage in an introduction Novelli wrote for a Gingrich volume on health care published last year. One sentence reads, "Newt's ideas are influencing how we at AARP are thinking about our national role in health promotion and disease prevention and in our advocating for system change."
Gingrich said yesterday that he has had many discussions with Novelli about the current Medicare bill, but he said: "I have not been an intermediary. He is comfortable enough with Frist and Hastert that he did not need me."
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